2000: 2013 Blu-ray:

directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr.
screenplay by Theodore Simonson and Kate Phillips
from an original idea by Irvine H. Millgate

Criterion #91.

In The Blob, newcomer Steven McQueen has a spectacular part — IN HIS HAIR — as a post-juvenile linquent known as “Steve.”

As in “Hey, Steve!” “Steve, what is it?” “Steve! Steve, help!” “I don’t think it can be killed, Steve!” and so forth. If you drink every time someone says “Steve” you will take at least 56 drinks. According to wordcounttools.com, the 5 most frequent non-trivial words in a complete transcript of The Blob are:

1. know
2. don’t
3. it’s
4. Steve
5. right

By the way, kids, I want to be clear that “drinking games” aren’t cool, and there’s really no need to drink alcohol to have fun watching The Blob, which is a wholesome movie, brought to you by your Christian neighbors at Good News Productions in Chester Springs PA, makers of 16-millimeter religious films. (In the commentary the producer calls them “a bunch of very nice monks.”) They’ve put together some good old-fashioned secular fun, suitable for the whole family. It’s the horror-movie equivalent of Family Circus. Sit back, enjoy yourself. We think you’ll get a few chills, you’ll chuckle, you’ll see a real sincere story with some exciting young people in it, you’ll go home feeling like you just had a fine soda pop. Then you’ll get some rest and be up and ready for church in the morning.

What works: Beautiful glowing color — Steve’s car must be the bluest in all moviedom — and black-as-indoors night skies, heavily cricketed. Feels like you’re at a nice low-key Halloween party. Investment in the good film stock and the good lab paid off. (From the commentary we learn that the film was substantially financed by the guy who owned the lab.) The bright red shiny Blob looks terrific on screen, and the goofy special effects are graphically pretty charismatic compared to most cheap-o movies. This stuff matters.

Because frankly if it weren’t for the delicious ice-cream-truck palette, this would be pretty hard to take. Every other scene aggressively, cheerfully wastes the viewer’s time. The script is the story of “The Blob” as I would have fleshed it out out in 5th grade. Dialogue a la The Young Visiters:

COP: Mr. Martin, Mr. Andrews, apparently Doc Hallen’s office was broken into by vandals tonight, and Steve and Jane seem to know something about it.

MR. MARTIN: Vandals? My daughter?

MR. ANDREWS: Well, you don’t think our kids were mixed up in it, do you?

COP: All we know is that they told us something had happened over at Dr. Hallen’s house. We’re not accusing anyone of what we found. Now, we can’t be more definite until we contact Dr. Hallen in Johnsonville.

STEVE: Dad, it isn’t vandalism. Dr. Hallen is dead, and he was killed by some sort of a monster! Now, I know, because I saw it, Dad.

MR. ANDREWS: Lieutenant, I want you to know that Steve is not in the habit of telling lies. If he says he’s not mixed up in this vandalism, you can be sure it’s the truth. Did you see this thing too, Jane?

JANE: Well, no, not exactly.

COP: Well, look, folks, we’ll all know more in the morning after we’ve called Johnsonville. I think the best thing now is for all of us to go home and get some sleep.

MR. ANDREWS: Maybe it’s a good idea, son. We can talk about this some more at home.

STEVE: Sure, Pop.

[exeunt]

We start right in the thick of things at Make-Out Point, but after 15 seconds Jane pulls away clear-headedly. Whew! The whole movie is a series of feints toward “teenage delinquent” tropes, made by a bunch of Christians who love everybody and don’t actually believe in such stuff. Drag racing, sneaking out of the house, run-ins with the police — that stuff sells tickets, so we’ll show it, but we’ll also show that in fact these are all good kids… and, you know, come to think of it, they’re not actually causing any problems.

The amount of Blob — and even of Blob talk — is surely the least in any classic monster movie. There’s not even a scientist on hand to pontificate about life on other planets. Someone in the commentary implies that the Blob is red because of the human blood it’s ingested. Hey, interesting, that’s a perfect example of the sort of thing you might want to put as a line in the movie… oh, no? You’d rather show the cops hanging around in the station, going about business as usual? I see. A good half the run-time of this 80 minute movie feels like it isn’t even about the Blob. (Notice how the scene above could be slotted into any monster movie. Apart from the word “monster” it could be slotted into any movie, period.)

It’s just the school play, or rather the town play. A fancy one, mind you! Certainly this would merit a standing ovation from the parents of all involved. Ultimately the Blob is only a MacGuffin; the real agenda is a picnic celebration of suburbia by itself. Hey, we could shoot a scene in the grocery store! Yeah, and in the diner! Cozy.

Carnival of Souls is the closest point of reference, for many reasons. But I think also of Manos: The Hands of Fate, et al. The American hobbyist movie is by tradition a horror movie. Don’t ask the filmmakers why, or what it’s supposed to do. The only question they’re thinking about is can they build it? ACME Horror Flick, Assembly Required. Like my high school going through all the steps entailed in putting on “Lil’ Abner,” despite the show’s utter meaninglessness to all involved, simply because they bought the kit; tab A in slot B.

So why was this the ACME kit? Q: What do teenagers have in common with monsters?

Oh, you already know. A: They both dare to break moral law. Id, baby! What else are movies for? Bust out the popcorn and let your dreamlife have at it! The uses of enchantment.

That at least is what well-formed teen-horror movies tap into. The funny thing about The Blob is that it completely fails to offer any of the Freudian goods, because it’s so damn Christian. The teens and The Blob are safely isolated at opposite ends of the moral spectrum, with nothing left in the middle to serve as a scratching post for the audience. These teens only seem like they’re full of animal impulses, but really, doggone it, you’ve just got to get to know them and you’ll see they mean well and they respect their elders! Meanwhile The Blob, yup, kills people without any compunction… but luckily for us, it’s just a damn Blob! It has no features; it has no intentions. It’s as close to a non-entity as possible. It is “compartmentalization” embodied.

Here’s Id as good and depersonalized as a Christian can get it. It’s still a threat though. It can still gobble you up and turn you into more of it. The answer of course is to freeze it hard like a rock and ship it far, far, far away.

You’ll be safe “as long as the Arctic stays cold.” Hm.

Doesn’t really travel.

Bonus features. The movie is just, well, The Blob, but these commentary tracks are something special. As with Carnival of Souls, I’m grateful for the opportunity afforded by Criterion to contemplate the counter-intuitive relationship between a real-world American milieu and its pulp product. The Blob is to Pennsylvania as Carnival of Souls is to Kansas, in some sense. I only wish Criterion had included some snippets of the religious films from Good News Productions, like they included a sampling of industrial films on Carnival. (This is the only thing I could find online. Enjoy?)

There are two commentaries; one with producer Jack H. Harris (plus competent filler from Criterion stalwart Bruce Eder), and the other with director Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. alternating with actor Robert Fields (after watching the movie you’ll of course know him as “blue shirt guy”).

I enjoyed both, but the one with Harris is a particular treat (and is the only one available on FilmStruck; I had to get the disc to hear the other one). Harris himself was not a countryside Christian; he was a seasoned schlock distributor, and his voice could serve as a reference recording for “Philadelphia Jew.” To my ear, his commentary track is a character study with one-man-show potential. Maybe I’d be the only audience member but I’d be into it.

His distributor’s-eye-view of film is fascinating and amusing. There’s obviously a real enthusiasm for the wacky product buried somewhere in there; it’s just always framed as a business consideration. In a sense, that filter keeps his enthusiasm all the more pure and naive. It’s all subconscious. A guy like this doesn’t think he’s ever thinking about meanings; he thinks it’s all about the market.

Here’s an excerpt to give a sense of his outlook.

I attended from time to time a meeting of announcements where our suppliers would get us together either in New York or in Chicago to discuss the coming program of films that we would be distributing. And there was a fellow named Bob Lippert who had a small company but was putting out about 12 pictures a year, and they were bread and butter to us. They were mostly Westerns, small Westerns in black and white, but each had a known name attached to it. That didn’t do me much good in my territory, which was very urban. But once in a while there’d be a goofy picture like King Dinosaur, which was made with a bunch of lizards, or Beast With a Million Eyes, which… I still don’t know what the monster was… and we would play around with that.

When I saw the upcoming program for 1954, I— everybody’s raving about how good it is, how wonderful, and I got up and I said “I think it stinks!” And I told them why, because of the— nothing but a bunch of English pictures and Westerns, with nothing for the competition— nothing to meet the competition, which was putting out science-fiction movies and delinquency movies and things like that, which were doing well at the box office.

So Lippert said to me — you know, I kind of embarrassed him in front of everybody; everybody’s patting him on the back, and he’s handing out cigars and congratulating himself — and I said— he said— I said to him— he said to me, “What’s your formula? What would you do?” And I said, “Well, I’d do a science-fiction movie, in color, give a sincere story, and make it for the price of two of these crappy pictures that you’re doing, and have something that the public would respond to.” And he said to me, “Well, if you think that’s so great, why the hell don’t you do it.”

I left the meeting determined to make a movie. I didn’t have a script. I hardly had an idea. But I knew that it had to be okay, and I knew I’d make it happen.

I feel like “make it for the price of two of these crappy pictures that you’re doing” really sums up The Blob. It’s bottom-of-the-barrel MST3K fodder times two. All the production value of two King Dinosaurs is here packed into one.

The movie being shown in the theater scene in The Blob is the extreme schlock oddity Daughter of Horror, which Harris had recently bought and revamped. Voice-over (“Yes…I am here… the demon who possesses your soul…”) read by Ed McMahon(!) and music by George Antheil(!). Clearly there are genuinely interesting things out there hiding in the world of very low-rent films, indies before there were indies. I don’t quite have the drive to explore that territory all by myself, and apart from very occasional dips like Carnival of Souls and The Blob, Criterion isn’t going to go there for me. Maybe someday I’ll find a trustworthy guide. For now I’ll settle for just getting a splash of it like this.

(Though stay tuned for the next selection.)

Hey, why not have a Jack Harris audio sample, too.

I can listen to this over and over.

He died just a few weeks ago, on March 14, 2017, at age 98.

Each of Yeaworth, Harris, and Fields spends a good deal of time reminiscing about Steve McQueen’s personality. “Difficult” is the consensus. You get a clear sense of him as one of these infuriating/magnetic troubled people whose every inscrutable action becomes an anecdote for the people around him. All three offer some variant of “We pretty much fell out of touch after The Blob, but this one time, a few years later, I ran into him and he acted kind of weird about it.” The fact that it feels like a story to them becomes the story to us.

For what it’s worth, in the movie Mr. McQueen absolutely does not stand out from the crowd of fellow no-names. He performs “teenager” by holding his arms like they’re made of wood; it’s a thoroughly unlikely “future megastar” performance. It’s equally easy to imagine an alternate reality in which any other one of the lunks onscreen went on to become, you know, Steve McQueen.

Meanwhile Aneta Corsaut as “Jane,” who spends pretty much the same amount of time onscreen as Steve McQueen, gets only the briefest acknowledgment from each commentator. Presumably this is because she wasn’t a pain in the ass. Her greatest claim to fame after The Blob was being the girlfriend on The Andy Griffith Show (and having an affair with Andy Griffith).

The only other feature is a slideshow; you can probably get your fill just by flipping through what’s available on Criterion’s site.

This box art is Criterion’s first commissioned illustration. (Sort of, maybe. It’s not clear what was going on with Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter, and Rushmore definitely had original art on the cover but it came from Wes Anderson’s brother so that’s kind of a special case.)

Apparently they didn’t think they could do anything with the original poster that didn’t look cheap. The art they got does the trick nicely of selling this as premium nostalgia junk rather than junk itself. They got so excited about it that they included it as a “special collectible poster” with the DVD.

Music is by Ralph Carmichael, who, like everyone else working for Yeaworth, is better known for his Christian than his secular work. The score is in the least-nuanced tradition of fervid TV shock-expressionism, executed professionally. (Which is in its way sort of impressive, for a composer who had never worked in this style before.) No sting is too strong for this kind of score; just hit every single beat with all you’ve got. We can laugh at this kind of movie and this kind of music, but I can’t deny that their marriage is occasionally compelling. Almost surreal, if you let it be.

There’s simply no satisfactory musical selection to be made here.

The obvious choice would seem to be the gleefully inapposite opening song, but a) I am trying whenever possible to avoid songs, and b) the song isn’t by Ralph Carmichael. It was stuck on there by Paramount when they picked up distribution, and is, in fact, by one Burt Bacharach, aged 30 and at the very beginning of his songwriting career, with lyrics (all 33 of ’em) by Mack David, brother to Hal. (Mack was a co-writer on “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” and various other Disney songs from the 50s. I guess I might have seen his name in credits but I never made the connection to Hal David before.)

When we look through Carmichael’s actual underscore, there simply isn’t any meaningful stretch of music that isn’t covered with dialogue. There are a few places where up to 30 seconds of music are allowed to remain only mildly molested by sound effects, but they’re just arbitrary windows in the middle of longer compositions and not suitable for excerpting.

At the very very beginning of the movie, as we fade in on Steve and Jane making out, there are 16 seconds of absurd lovey-dovey music, which stands more or less in the clear. But it turns out that this sappy “Love Theme from The Blob” is in fact by music supervisor Jean Yeaworth, whom it may not be entirely sexist to point out also happens to be the wife of the director. The orchestration is by Carmichael, but that’s not going to cut it.

Ultimately the only thing that does cut it is the following cue, which is complete at 5 seconds long. This makes it the shortest selection in my Criterion soundtrack compilation, which I can accept because, you know, it’s The Blob. (Harris reports Steve McQueen’s assessment years later: “It ain’t Othello!”)

This cue was apparently entitled “Violent Bridge” by the composer, whose mostly generic titles (“Stress and Strain”; “Horror Bridge”; “Buildup”) suggest to me that this music might have been adapted from previously written material. But that’s just speculation. Maybe he just didn’t like thinking too specifically about Blobs. These titles stay closer to Jesus.

Anyway, it’s the music when Steve and Jane see the doomed old man lurching across the road and have to come to a sudden stop. Enjoy it while it lasts.

2000: 2015:

directed by Masaki Kobayashi
original stories by Yakumo Koizumi [= Lafcadio Hearn]
screenplay by Yoko Mizuki

Criterion #90, Kwaidan.

怪談 = kaidan = weird tales.

Kwaidan with the W is today considered an “archaic transliteration” but continues to be the standard title of this movie. Please be advised that the W is not to be pronounced. (But try telling that to the guy who does the commentary.)

怪 = kai = mystery/strangeness/apparition/the supernatural/the uncanny
談 = dan = (as suffix:) story, talk, conversation

If you type “怪談” into Google Translate it gives you “Ghost stories.”
If you type “怪 談” it gives you “Strange stories.”
If you type “怪” and “談” on successive lines it gives you “Monster Consultation” which would be a great name for something, albeit not for this movie. More likely a Sesame Street skit.

If you trace each stroke of those two characters in the title screen above, you’ll get a sense of just how rough and ugly the brushwork is. We’re all used to the “lettering of the beast” effect in English-language horror typography, but we don’t necessarily know how it looks in other alphabets. This is the Japanese version: whoever or whatever it was that put that brush to that paper, it was something other than a master craftsman — what could be more disturbing? Something primal and scary is coming.

The credits that follow are exquisitely printed and laid out with letterpress fussiness, but they’re intercut with the unearthly billowing of ink falling through water. The civilized world cannot stand against the world of the senses. That which is wet, that which seeps under doors, devours all, silent. These gentle bells are going to keep ringing whenever they will, no matter what you try to do, no matter what order your credit sequence tries to impose. That’s the essence of horror.

Even if this isn’t a horror movie as such, it delivers the aesthetic spirit of horror. You may want to draw neat, rigid lines and “know” the world… but something with its own nature, something rough and unpretty, something from before, is coming.

(Namely: feelings.)

This is a fine movie to sit back and have a drink to. It trickles rather than pours. It’s steady, and if you’re sufficiently passive, it caresses you into being steady, seemingly for the sake of respecting the folklore, the careful Japanese tradition of it all. Then once your heartbeat is nice and slow, it uses that space to make you uneasy.

I got actual goosebumps at one point — not common for me as a moviegoer — and it made me think about how my goosebump response is down a slightly different path from direct horror. It’s the path of “suspense,” in the literal sense: the feeling that some unpleasant outcome is suspended, has begun but is nowhere near finished. It’s clear where it’s going; it just hasn’t gotten there yet.

Kwaidan absolutely refuses to speed up. If something eerie or ominous begins to happen, you’re stuck with it for as long as it takes. If a ghost-woman is going to swoop down toward you, that swoop is going to take several seconds. Here she comes: watch. That’s where the goosebumps come in. Your mind might know where things are headed but your body has to live with the present moment, and the present moment may be distressingly long.

The trance effect of the serene. I said something similar about Andrei Rublev. Some emotions can only be touched from within a trance. Both movies share an interest in evoking the national myth, the old world, the world from which the folklore arises. The lullaby quality helps get at primordial feelings. In Tarkovsky’s case the feelings were somewhere behind religious awe; here they’re somewhere behind superstitious fear. Fear in a trance is a whole other emotional territory from anxious, quick, jumpy fear. Rather than your life being at stake it’s your sense of life. Will things go on seeming like themselves?

Kwaidan is like a great-grandfather to modern “J-Horror,” though aside from the standard thematic elements — women’s hair, vengeful spirits, the sea — the connection is mostly in the underlying sense of the gradual and the inescapable. Stasis that exerts pressure, or very deliberate motion that becomes intensely pregnant. I imagine those are aesthetic techniques that extend back into the traditional Japanese theater arts. In cinematic terms it means a lot of crane and tracking shots, smooth, measured. The attention glides forward toward a mysterious figure with its back to the camera. It’s probably going to turn around and show its face now. That’s probably the next thing that’s going to happen. It’s certainly going to happen now.

At the same time Kwaidan is much quieter, more meditative and less purposeful, than a horror movie. It’s painterly, more concerned with the integrity of its own mise-en-scène than with the effect on the audience. It’s compelling because that kind of integrity has force, but the force is in the direction of no particular genre. It’s sui generis; for all its big-budget accessibility, it’s really an art movie.

There are four tales here, running about 40, 40, 80, and 20 minutes respectively. I found the first two the most effective; the long third segment gets the lion’s share of the attention in discussions of this movie but I found it somewhat more demanding on my conscious attention and thus less rewarding to my trance, which wants to remain pure and passive. The lightweight fourth segment has plenty of charm — M.R. James came to mind — but in this company, it doesn’t feel like it’s really given enough time to register.

Recurring theme: the past can’t be denied. The past is not to be trifled with; it’s no joke. In the climax of the first story this erupts beautifully right into the makeup of the protagonist. Existentially unnerving.

Japanese period movies have the fantastically awful tradition of tooth blackening to work with. They get this repugnant visual for free because it’s historically accurate! Hollywood can only envy such a gift. Yeah, sure, in a western, the old prospector can grin and be missing most of his teeth, but seriously, who cares? So what? That’s nothing next to the impact of a wealthy noblewoman coyly parting her lips to reveal a sickening horror.

The problem of “what to do with folk” is one of the major recurring themes in 19th and 20th-century art. Kwaidan is a difficult movie to categorize by genre in great part because it answers that question with such distinction. This is a genuinely original cinematic approach to the challenge posed by folklore and it results in a unique artistic product. The idiosyncrasy arises, in part, from Japan’s particularly acute sense of modernity fighting it out with tradition — note how the trailer assumes that it will be crowd-pleasing to brag that the movie is “the essence of the Japanese, revived here as a protest to modern society.” Hard to imagine an American movie ever playing that angle. Not overtly, anyway.

That said, the overall aesthetic vision here, of a traditional tale treated as raw material to be cranked through the mechanism of an archly stylized production, all shot on entrancingly artificial sets, reminded me of the Jim Henson Storyteller. And those color-saturated “exteriors” against huge surreal painted backgrounds, under studio ceilings unseen but felt, suggested the weird interior/exterior spaces of Hollywood dance or dream sequences. Those giant eyes in the sky are right out of Dalí’s work on Spellbound.

The whole lavish production is just a pleasure to take in. And Kobayashi’s fluid camera technique is consistently engaging. I’ll admit that there were moments when the deliberate pace left me without any real drama to savor, but I was never without something to see. And hear — see below.

But first the bonus stuff. I watched on FilmStruck, which offers all the supplements from the 2015 disc. Thanks, FilmStruck!

• New 2K digital restoration of director Masaki Kobayashi’s original cut, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray

The restored image looks spectacular; the balance of the 60s palette is wonderful. Apparently the Criterion edition that was available up until 2015 was a cut version of the movie and didn’t look very good. Just another reason to be glad I’m moving so slowly through this project.

• New audio commentary by film historian Stephen Prince

It’s okay for a one of those, but it’s definitely a one of those. Did Kobayashi have political allegories in mind when he put those eyes in the sky? Who knows. All I know is, Stephen Prince didn’t convince me that he did; he just convinced me that a film scholar type might try to say that he did. A lot of compositions are described as we’re looking at them (“The vertical tree bisects the image”). He talks a fair bit about “the Z-axis,” which just FYI is “the axis orthogonal to the picture plane.” Etc. And three hours is a lot, for that sort of thing. (Though I appreciate that Professor Prince also affords himself room to make sincere doofus comments, like pointing out that if the priests had shown “a little more hands-on attitude and follow-through” they could probably have saved Hoichi from his fate. It’s true!)

• Interview with Kobayashi from 1993, conducted by filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda

This is pretty good. Kobayashi is wearing his regulation “old man” hat and sunglasses, and you can really hear every smack and grumble in his throaty old man voice. He smokes a cigarette as he mutters in shop-talk mode about the production’s financial problems. We watch such interviews for a sense of the human encounter and I got that.

• New interview with assistant director Kiyoshi Ogasawara

Nothing particularly interesting to say, but he was there, and he was involved in the restoration process, so sure.

• New piece about author Lafcadio Hearn, on whose versions of Japanese folktales Kwaidan is based

This is the strongest bonus feature. The interviewee is Christopher Benfey, who has a very good enthusiastic professor manner and gives a nice miniature talk that actually feels relevant to appreciation of the movie. Recommended.

• Trailers • New English subtitle translation

GREAT STUFF

• PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien

Not bad, actually.

Toru Takemitsu is a very big name as both a film and a “serious” composer, so I was looking forward to seeing what he’d do, but I had no idea just how much this movie was going to be The Toru Takemitsu Show. What he’s done here is highly conspicuous, and truly brilliant; I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like it and indeed I wonder if there’s anything else out there that can compare.

“Music and sound effects by,” it says, and the brilliance lies in the fact that the two are made absolutely equivalent. The soundtrack is treated as a single continuous texture. Sometimes we hear the snapping of wood when we’re watching wood break on screen; elsewhere we hear the same sound simply as expressive percussion. The slight unreality of bad Foley work, subconsciously familiar to every moviegoer, the subtle gap between a sound effect and its purported source, is here pried open like a coffin out of which ghouls escape. At the end of the first episode, when the samurai is beset by horror and escapes over crumbling floorboards, we hear the expressionist musical equivalent of all his shrieks and stumbles, in electronically manipulated quasi-musical sounds, but we do not hear anything directly from his world. The effect is intense and terrific. Takemitsu tries variations on it throughout. A horse’s hooves remain onscreen but their reality is gradually submerged into dream-juxtaposition as their sound, already artificially rhythmic, is gradually replaced by the clack of a loom — or is it just the avant-garde thunking of the prepared piano? Or what’s the difference, really?

Part of what’s so wonderful about this approach is that it primes us to perceive an unearthly musicality even in scenes with no “musical” content. In the fourth episode when our protagonist waits by a ticking clock, the rhythmic ticking of the clock can’t help but take on a distinctly musical intensity. Or the girls playing paddleball outside the writer’s house. Clack. Clack. By that point the film has taught us that things are not merely themselves; they resonate in the spirit world, which may not always be visible but is always audible. All sound, in this film, is less diegetic than it might be.

As is the silence. This is the most carefully silent movie I’ve ever seen. I’ve always enjoyed the unexpected transcendence of the moment in Duck Soup when suddenly the audio drops to absolute silence for the mirror sequence. A true silence is a powerful effect, and Takemitsu and Kobayashi do more with it here than I’ve ever seen done. Just watch the opening shots of a spooky abandoned house, scored by a few clicks and a lot of pure silence, and immediately experience something special.

Takemitsu was an experimentalist in the broadest sense, which is to say that for him, avant-gardism like this was itself just an experiment. Some of his music is extremely conventional. The rest of it falls freely in the expanse between. He wrote some 100 film scores but I gather that he considered this one his proudest achievement in the medium. In a way this movie makes the best possible case for the aesthetic world of John Cage and musique concrète; the skeptical viewer immediately has intuitive access to ideas that would otherwise seem esoteric.

Our selection is the Main Titles. “Theme from Kwaidan” you can call this. (Yes, it’s playing. Give it at least 16 seconds!)

Given how vital silence is to this film, the comings and goings of the ever-present hiss — which are surely the byproduct of some kind of computerized attempt at noise reduction — are unfortunate. When I first listened I really believed that the title music consisted of bells and sounds of the ocean. But the soundtrack as released on record — the whole score tastefully condensed by Takemitsu into a 27-minute suite — makes clear that this is not the case. It’s just meant to be bells and silence.

So, hey, “new 2K digital restoration” restorators: that’s not really what I’d call top-quality silence. It’s not the kind of premium silence I’ve come to expect from Criterion.

Know what I’m saying?

2000:

screenplay by Brian De Palma and Louisa Rose
from an original story by Brian De Palma
directed by Brian De Palma

Criterion #89.

Yeah! Now you’re talking! This is a piece of trash! Easy!

It’s lively trash, trash with gusto. It’s essentially a Psycho fan film made by a kid. This kid has also seen Rear Window and Rope, and a lot of B movies, and probably some pornos. He’s definitely watched the dream sequence from Rosemary’s Baby a bunch of times and gotten stoned and argued about it with his friends.

This kid loves these things, as only a fan can love, to the point where he feels like he’s in some sense their author. The way the boy in The Squid and the Whale tells people he wrote the Pink Floyd song he identifies with, because he feels like he might as well have written it: he could have written it, so essentially, he did. Well, this kid loves Hitchcock so much he wants you to know he might as well have been Alfred Hitchcock and made his movies. Maybe he is! Maybe he did! See? Look!

A kid who’s 32 years old and already a successful filmmaker can still be a kid. He can certainly still be a fan. All artists start as fans but some artists are more fans than others. Some never outgrow it. Quentin Tarantino is in the same boat. You can travel a long way in that boat.

Is Sisters a tribute? Pastiche? Homage? I strongly suspect that Brian De Palma had no such ambitions or concerns. This stuff was in his head; he just did the things that it occurred to him to do. Sisters is a pure and spontaneous product of his fandom. It’s fan art.

I want to be clear about the degree of scorn I am expressing: very little. Fan art is real art, can be valuable. I think of Robert Crumb (in Crumb) talking about how he and his brothers ran obsessive variations on Disney’s Treasure Island until it had been made to bear all their demons, became unrecognizable, took on a strange and convoluted life of its own. The transmutation of one artist’s work into another artist’s work is fascinating and vital. Sisters carries over its source materials mostly intact, but some degree of psychic digestion has occurred. The very same enthusiasm that drives De Palma to blithely re-enact entire scenes from Psycho and Rear Window also drives him to do some wacky experimentation with a split-screen, and to open with a kooky TV-show parody fake-out like something out of Monty Python. Why not? For him it all goes together. He’s just following his muse, doing his thing. “His thing” is 80% other movies he’s seen — but, you know, whose isn’t?

By the way, both of those experiments are… successes? They’re certainly not failures. They’re something. The audience says “why not?” too.

The idea that Brian De Palma is an auteur with a taste for deliberate “camp” and “deconstruction” seems to me dubious as always. It sure seems like he’s sincerely taking his best stab at it all. The result falls somewhere in the space between Mystery Science Theater 3000 and dignity. I’m happy to go exploring in that space.

De Palma is, at the very least, irrepressible, which is its own sort of charm. This is not a movie constrained by any sense of shame; that’s a good cheerful feeling and I appreciate it.

The hilarious grand clunker of a final shot wants you to think that you’re laughing with. I’m pretty sure I was laughing at. A De Palma fan would probably say that the important thing is that I was engaged. I can’t deny it! I originally intended just to get a taste of the opening of this movie, but ended up sitting through the whole thing in one go, in an unbroken chain of amusement. That’s a success!

I do not recommend Sisters! But that doesn’t mean I had a bad time. Not at all.

Hey, remember Dead Ringers? That makes this unsatisfying twin-horror movie number 2 for Criterion. (As soon as I’ve posted this entry I’ll go and change the number on the big board.)

Margot Kidder is clearly amusing herself doing her dinner-party impression of “french girl,” which is a reasonably charming thing to watch. She was involved with Brian De Palma at the time. Not widely reported but it does help explain the movie. Jennifer Salt was her roommate. They lived on the beach. De Palma and De Niro and Scorsese and Spielberg and the whole gang from Easy Riders, Raging Bulls used to hang out at their place, get high, hook up with each other, etc. Also helpful to keep in mind.

Featuring the youngest Charles Durning yet — for me, anyway — not doing a particularly good job, but I don’t blame him. His worthless character is a detective who announces that he’s a graduate of the “Brooklyn Institute of Modern Investigation.” I guess that might count as “camp”? It entertained me, at least.

I watched on FilmStruck, which offers no bonus features. The DVD has nothing substantial, no video or audio, only page-through stuff:

• Director Brian De Palma’s 1973 Village Voice essay “Murder by Moog: Scoring the Chill,” on working with composer Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Citizen Kane)
• A 1973 print interview with De Palma on the making of Sisters
• “Rare Study of Siamese Twins in Soviet,” the 1966 Life magazine article that inspired De Palma
• Excerpts from the original press book, including ads and exploitation
• Hundreds of production, publicity, and behind-the-scenes stills

Now, would I like to check that stuff out? Do I plan to get the DVD from the library eventually and do it? Sure. I’ll come back and post about it here when I have. But am I gonna let it stop me from proceeding onward for the time being? No. That would be silly.

Watch this space.

Bernard Herrmann — yes, the actual Bernard Herrmann — is on hand. He knows exactly what’s up and does an expert impression of his own greatest hits, cranked up to schlock-hundred-and-ten. He throws in some Moog synthesizers, mostly to make wailing theremin noises. Just in case you weren’t sure whether this was a thriller. Moog sez: it is.

One of the Moog players was composer Howard Blake. Quote:

“I played synthesizer for him on one appalling film called The Sisters. It’s about two siamese twins or something, and I said to Bernard: ‘This is absolutely garbage, Bernard. Why are you doing it?’ and he burst into tears — it felt terrible. He said: ‘I just want to work, Howard. I’ve got to work!'”

Our selection is the Prelude. Meant to accompany ominous close-ups of fetuses with a terrifying case of prenatal Friz Quadrata. You can knock the movie all you like but let’s not deny that these are some pretty great titles.

(Plus, psst: here’s a little bonus from the broomlet collection. Score readers will note that several details have been changed for the recording. Fascinating, right?)

Bernard Herrmann was a great man. I’m glad to have seen this movie because it meant I got to hear one of his scores that I’d never heard before. It’s good.

2001:

written and directed by Sergei Eisenstein

Ivan the Terrible, Criterion #88.

= discs 2–3 of 3 in Criterion #86, “Eisenstein: The Sound Years.”

Ivan the Terrible consists of two separate films:

[Ivan Grozniy] = Ivan the Terrible. Referred to by Criterion as Ivan the Terrible, Part I. 1943–44, premiered 1944.

On the left is the DVD version. On the right is the FilmStruck version.

The DVD version is a restoration from 1987; the FilmStruck version is a restoration from 2014. Obviously the 2014 picture is far better, but the subtitles are burned in, and I wanted a clean image, so I went to grab the identical frame from the DVD version. Turns out there was no identical frame to be found in the DVD version; the smoke in the background was completely different smoke. Uh-oh! More on this subject below.

[Ivan Grozniy. Skaz vtoroy: Boyarskiy zagovor] = Ivan the Terrible. Part Two: The Boyars’ Plot. Referred to by Criterion as Ivan the Terrible, Part II. 1944–46, but suppressed upon completion. Finally premiered in 1958, and thus receives the misleading date “(1958)” in Criterion’s database.

(Here the smoke matches.)

A corny and unrepresentative American trailer (presumably from 1959).

A hundred times more rewarding than Alexander Nevsky, you’ll be relieved to hear.

Not to say that it’s any sort of fun. It’s more “really something,” as in “That Ivan the Terrible is really something!” If you’re susceptible to being mesmerized by creative fervor itself, there are genuine thrills here. I think again of Scorsese’s comment on The Red Shoes: that there’s something rare and special about artists being so wildly committed to their own vision, so “out of control.” Eisenstein could never be called “out of control” — control is his métier — but he is certainly far-gone in a strange and intense direction. The two Ivan films, especially the second one, seem to me a major achievement of the same species as the The Red Shoes: they engage the viewer independent of their questionable meanings. They impress by sheer aesthetic force.

It’s built from the same picture-gallery technique, but Ivan works where Nevsky didn’t because of the sustained human intensity. The signature image is ominous, tensed, anticipatory staring. All those intent tight-lipped bug-eyed stares keep each scene pumped with energy. I think this may well be the most bug-eyed movie of all time; really a minute doesn’t go by without someone’s eyeballs flaring melodramatically in tight close-up. In some sequences it’s every single shot for minutes on end. I’m not knocking it; those are the best sequences. As with Nevsky, Eisenstein’s strongest suit, his essential emotion, is for something to be impending. Here he papers the walls with it.

The Disney influence is no joke. The whole production seems to aspire as best it can toward cartoon-dom; grand opera via Pinocchio. And, as with Spielberg, we also sense that the director is a real “boys’ adventure” enthusiast; he likes comic books and pulp, anything that inflates the stakes and then zooms in hard on the object of interest. The attention caroms around the giant sets, gripping fiercely to one exaggerated image after another.

Or, in a slightly different aesthetic direction, Citizen Kane. The gigantic false shadow of Ivan’s profile (which jaws a bit when he talks, like Zoltar) is Snow White by way of Welles. Not to mention the general Kane overtones to the plot. I assumed Orson would have loved this. Turns out he sniffed a bit at it, called it “the worst film of a great cinéaste,” wrote: “Eisenstein’s uninhibited preoccupation with pictorial effect sometimes leads him… into sterile exercises, empty demonstrations of the merely picturesque.” Eisenstein apparently responded by sending Welles a 40-page letter defending his work, and the two took up a correspondence. Unfortunately I can’t quote from it because it was all destroyed in 1970. (Robert Shaw was renting Welles’ house in Madrid and somehow managed to set his office on fire. Drunkenly? Smoking in bed? Unclear. Quite a story.)

James Agee wrote that Ivan the Terrible was “on a scale as ambitious anyhow as that of Shakespeare in his political plays — and more politically knowledgeable and incomparably hotter to handle…” This is an apt comparison. The experience of watching Ivan actually helped clarify for me how to watch Shakespeare’s histories: of course the audience’s thoughts would immediately go to the current ruler. Historical drama can’t help but be a political metaphor for the present. It happens automatically; the writer doesn’t need to lift a finger.

The great unavoidable puzzle of this film is what, if anything, it’s saying about Stalin. Remarkably, the subject was Stalin’s own choice; the political metaphor was official. That he voluntarily self-identified with a notorious tyrant created a uniquely terrifying opportunity for an artist to play with fire. In Stalin’s own words: “Ivan the Terrible was very cruel. You can show how cruel he was, but you must show why he had to be cruel.” Does Eisenstein do that? Highly debatable!

In addition to the pan quoted above, Orson Welles apparently wrote another column (I can’t find the actual text online) in which he compared Ivan to Wilson — which is its contemporary, bizarre as that is to contemplate — and complained that both films gave their protagonists too many political excuses in the form of would-be humanizing detail. To my mind, it seems like given the Soviet circumstances, the movie gives Ivan impressively few excuses. He grows a devil’s beard and goes around raging paranoiacally and basically acting like Jafar; not generally considered sympathetic character choices. Of course Orson was only writing about Part I; the sense that things are coming off the rails really accelerates in Part II.

I don’t possess the historical awareness necessary to untangle the official metaphors from the subversive ones. Maybe that’s the point. The subtlety and complexity of the game is suggested simply by the title: “Terrible” how? What degree of “terror” did Stalin consider flattering? How much villainy was he willing to admit? Dictators want people to cower before them; they also get offended when accused of wanting people to cower before them. It’s a fine line. Knowing what’s at stake for the artists, the whole thing gathers an unsettling intensity for the audience by the end. It feels like the whole thing is “The Mousetrap,” designed to catch the conscience of the king. It’s creepy. The Wellesian ghostliness of it all, the surreal dreamy intensity, becomes the excuse for very gradually turning the proceedings from Stalin’s fantasy to Stalin’s nightmare. One imagines a Ghost of Purges Past leading him through one tableau after another, toward the harrowing red room at the end.

It’s as though after Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein swore to himself that he would never again be an artistic coward. When e.g. Philip leans right into the camera and growls “justice must be done against the Tsar!,” the sense of high stakes — of the whole production being complicit in something dangerous — is thrilling and distressing. No wonder Eisenstein had a heart attack on the day he finished Part II!

In that state of intensity, I found myself laughing a huge loud honest belly laugh when Ivan says “From now on I will be just what you say I am! I will be… TERRIBLE.” and then looks straight into the camera and raises his eyebrow. I’m laughing again now. It’s so great. I’m not mocking it. Just laughing.

Of course Stalin condemned it.

Eisenstein’s technique just wasn’t well-suited to doling out drama itself. There’s a rhythmic problem: the actual events take up absolutely minimal screen time and are staged with efficiency, while the reactive tableaux are prolonged as long as the visual holds Eisenstein’s interest. I guess that was Welles’s complaint. But from my perspective, it simply means the artistic emphasis is elsewhere. The visual intensity is so strong and the significance of the plot is so ambivalent and obscure that the film plays as though it has some secret meaning, somewhere in the subconscious, beyond the text. These are pure archetypes going through ritual motions, some kind of pantomime mystery play.

Toward the end of Part II one almost wants to turn off the subtitles and just drink it in as pure emotional pattern. The devil-man and the child-man and the man-woman, all staring, staring. It could be done with masks. Claustrophobia accumulates, a surreal underground feeling from all these weird windowless rooms. The wicked aunt strips from black to white and then sings a full-fledged aria/lullaby of skin-crawling creepiness. Unreality sets in. The staring into the camera starts to get really uninhibited and crazy, as we near the end…

And then suddenly, good god, it cuts to color! (Spoiler alert.) The effect couldn’t be more shocking. It’s really one of the most intense and disturbing things I’ve ever seen in a movie: it’s like the very premise of black-and-white film, the premise of the dream at its foundation, gets nauseated. The sleeper rolls over in bed and the dream suddenly lurches feverishly into a different part of the brain. Here are the same actors, pale in their black-and-white movie makeup, in a new hellish red world, looking suddenly modern and present, like they’ve traveled through time. It’s a horror.

After hearing that, you’re probably curious to sample it, but the impact can’t be reproduced by linking straight to the moment. You have to have watched 2 1/2 hours of black-and-white first. In The Wizard of Oz, it’s a striking effect when the color floods in, but it comes at exactly the juncture where one wants it to, emotionally. In Ivan it’s just the opposite. It couldn’t come at a more upsetting time. It’s the last thing you need. (Also it has much more impact in the new restoration, which isn’t linkable online.)

(Fine, if you must: you can watch the clip on Criterion’s site. That’s still the old version.)

• Nikolai Cherkasov is still just some guy, but he gives a much better performance here. Maybe it’s that he has better makeup and costumes to work with. Someone on YouTube compared him to Charlton Heston. I can see that too.

• Intriguing scene where the lead character dies and everybody proceeds to betray him. The audience knows that despite all appearances, he can’t possibly be gone; there’s a sequel, after all! These creates an interesting kind of suspense. Kind of a ghost story in advance: yeah, he sure does seem to be dead, but all the same, these poor fools had better watch themselves! Christ’s giant painted eye watches from the wall to drive home the point.

• Important vocabulary:

boyar: a member of the old aristocracy in Russia, next in rank to a prince
Oprichnik: a member of a special police force organized by Ivan the Terrible, infamous for terrorizing the citizenry

I watched on FilmStruck but the bonus features aren’t available online so I got out the DVDs too. No commentary, but a bunch of other stuff:

First of all there are “Drawings and production stills,” which in this case are actually rather interesting. Eisenstein sketched everything out in thick black pencil, in a friendly, eager cartoon style with strong lines; it looks sort of like Robert McCloskey or Bill Peet or someone like that, and gives a fascinating alternate angle on a film that can sometimes seem overbearingly serious. The drawings have an innocent spring in their step and help one to recognize the ways the film does too.

Then there’s “Deleted scenes,” which includes the complete original childhood “prologue,” including a whole Prokofiev song that was cut from the final version, as well as the one surviving scene from the never-completed and otherwise lost “Part III.” I don’t like quoting the Criterion Contraption guy (who blogged his way through this stuff 8 years ago), but he’s right in pointing out that this orphan scene — which can’t have been very widely seen, prior to the release of this DVD — is restaged almost exactly with Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi. Coincidence? Anyway, this was all worthwhile viewing.

And then finally there are two half-hour video essays by scholars. The first is on “The History of Ivan the Terrible” by Joan Neuberger, which is acceptable if a little forced and dry, with an emphasis on the autobiographical element of the film, apparently well attested by Eisenstein. The second is on “Eisenstein’s Visual Vocabulary,” by Yuri Tsivian. This one I thought was quite excellent. He observes a few recurring visual motifs and uses Eisenstein’s sketches and notebooks to show how deliberate everything was, to the Nth degree.

Like I said: Eisenstein is the academic’s dream auteur. Unlike nearly every other director, he actually planned every element of his films with over-analysis in mind; he directed for close-reading. One feels what one never does: that academic commentary, full of cross-references to the artist’s notes and lectures, is an absolutely vital tool in appreciating the scope of the achievement. Tsivian ends with a quote from Eisenstein’s diaries, responding to the accusation that his film was “overburdened with shadows.”:

Overburdened with shadows? Too much imagery stuffed in? But it is too much only for those who do not read images but merely rush after action. Too much for those who go to the movies for telegraphic syntax, rather than for poetic writing with repetitions, illustrations and music — for those who look for the anecdote alone.

Nowadays, in the era of DVDs and beyond, this begins to seem like a viable technique; any detail can always be paused and rewatched at leisure. What’s odd to me is that he was already disdaining those who go to the movies just for “telegraphic syntax” in an era when hardly anyone in the audience would have the opportunity to see a given film more then once or twice. Who was this audience he imagined that would be consciously weighing every hidden complexity? And yet within a few decades they undeniably existed. In some ways it feels like Eisenstein called them into being by writing and thinking the way he did.

I guess the way I usually feel about the academic constellation surrounding a work in this case is how I feel about the work itself, since it’s a willing participant in that constellation: it manages to be right on its own terms… but what about the audience’s terms? I feel like those should be the terms that matter. I sound like a Soviet censor, don’t I.

Assuming the gawky Lieutenant Kizhe never enters the Criterion Collection, this is the last we’ll be seeing of Sergei Prokofiev.

There’s at least a ballet’s worth of music here, mostly of high quality, but not always ideally matched to the action. It seems like the timing element was underemphasized in the collaboration between Eisenstein and Prokofiev. It’s pretty clear that Prokofiev just wrote music to descriptions of each scene, not to a particular pacing. The cues all vamp to fill the time, and almost every significant cue comes back again and again verbatim.

Frankly there could stand to be even more music. Given the way it plays, I wanted this thing to be wall to wall. It’s such a stage show already.

Prokofiev never did his own suite or adaptation of this music (which constitutes his Op. 116); others have taken a few stabs at arranging the thing for concert use as an oratorio or the like, but without daring the degree of recomposition necessary, so it’s something of an awkward fit. Unlike Alexander Nevsky, the film is probably still the best way to experience this music. It also gives a sort of immediate aesthetic insight into the spirit behind the style. Watching Ivan spurred me to re-investigate some of Prokofiev’s scores that I’ve known for years, because of the feeling that I had fresh access to the artistic world from whence the music came. (I note that, for example, essentially every single re-recording of the Ivan the Terrible music takes most of it significantly faster and nervier than the original recording. With this in mind I wondered if maybe some of Prokofiev’s other music was generally being played faster than it should be.)

Before I embed any music I have to address the restoration. With Nevsky it was clear that the 80s restoration had resorted to excessive interference in the form of resetting titles and rerecording music, whereas the newer version seemed basically faithful and reliable. In the case of Ivan the situation seems… reversed? Muddier, at least. The 1987 version from the disc has a far inferior image to the 2014 version, certainly, but as I mentioned above, the titles for Part I seemed to have been completely recomposited in the new version, making one wonder just how invasive the restorers allowed themselves to be across the board. The restored color sequence looks truly rich and spectacular, which means I have to wonder how much of that color is authentically recovered and how much is wishfully imposed. With all that digital power it can be very easy to get carried away.

In the case of the audio it seems clear that the 80s version is more faithful. The music in the recent version has received heavy artificial sweetening apparently sourced from a modern recording. In several places this has clearly been done without reference to the score, and instruments that aren’t supposed to be playing turn up. Plus the whole thing has been run through some kind of tasteless auto-normalization that makes quiet moments gradually get louder until the hiss is overwhelming, then suddenly drop away when someone starts speaking. There are also places where the dialogue has obviously been re-recorded, I guess to eliminate clipping. Doesn’t seem like a good policy.

For example, in the eerie lullaby, the performance is all chopped up. In the original, the singer hums along with the accompaniment, a beautiful and creepy touch that isn’t done in any of the rerecordings because apparently it wasn’t in the manuscript score, and in the 2014 restoration, about half of the humming has been wiped away. Unacceptable!

Anyway, it’s tempting to believe that think the version on the DVD is the original recording, intact. And yet at the end, the same restoration-specific credit appears as in the Nevsky disc, identifying Emin Khachaturian as conductor. So, with nothing else to compare it to, I have no way of knowing what we’re really hearing. My gut tells me the following audio, sourced from the DVDs, is at least mostly the original 40s soundtrack recording, overseen by Prokofiev. But consider this all a big shrug of a disclaimer.

So here’s some Prokofiev for you.

From Part I: the Overture.

Part II reuses the same Overture, so our second selection is the “Dances of the Oprichniki” — which in Prokofiev’s score is divided into the “Chaotic Dance” and then (at 0:41) the “Orderly Dance.”

Here ends the box set. That’s more than enough Eisenstein for me at the moment (and that’s all for The Criterion Collection). Writing about movies that aspire to be texts, that want to be written about, is kind of a drag, and throws me off my game. I feel like Eisenstein and a thousand scholars got there first and are watching me as I react. That’s a burden.

We’re about to go through a wacky, pulpy patch in the list. Just in time.

2001:

directed by Sergei Eisenstein
with the collaboration of Dimitri Vasilyev
screenplay by Sergei Eisenstein and Pyotr Pavlenko

[Aleksandr Nevskiy] = Alexander Nevsky, Criterion #87.
= disc 1 of 3 in Criterion #86, “Eisenstein: The Sound Years.”

(Sorry, guys: no trailer available.)

Like many people, I had known this title principally for its music. Now I’ve seen it. Too bad about the movie.

I found Alexander Nevsky unengaging in the extreme; I’m a fairly limber cultural masochist and this still managed to befuddle me. I procrastinated the DVD all the way to the library’s 10-renewal limit. That’s happened only once before, with The Last Temptation of Christ. Not a coincidence, I think. Both films have the same underlying flaw: they’re essentially dutiful, made to placate a threatening authority rather than achieve anything in itself. They feel like homework. Scorsese’s threatening authority was the Catholic church in his psyche; Eisenstein’s was Stalin. In both cases the artist set aside his authentic enthusiasms to make a show of eating his vegetables. There’s nothing worse.

Unlike Scorsese, Eisenstein didn’t fall into this trap for psychological reasons; he was pushed in. He did it because the alternative was to be shot. I can’t blame him. But there are heaps of Soviet propaganda that nobody watches today, exactly because it was all produced in bad faith under duress and is accordingly unrewarding. This movie survives in film studies and in the Criterion Collection because Eisenstein’s craftsmanship purportedly elevates it above the heap. But craft is in service of art. If the art is manifestly void, what can the craft really be worth?

My beef here is not political. Propaganda can be legitimate art, and I’m not inclined to hold ideological grudges against movies while I’m watching them. If this had been aesthetically digestible I would have eaten it up regardless of the politics. The problem is that it’s not good propaganda. It doesn’t have any heart in it, just mind. And propaganda has to be all heart; that’s the point. Xenophobia is supposed to be a thrilling adventure! If you’re making a shameless appeal to fear, pride, and anger, and it comes out stolid and monotonous, something’s gone very wrong.

The fact that Eisenstein made it this way and then the Stalinists applauded it this way proves that the whole Soviet ideological operation was a merry-go-round of insincerity. Everyone involved was surely perfectly capable of noticing that this movie contains no actual characters or emotions. Or they would have been, if they hadn’t been so committed to self-delusion. It’s hard to believe anyone has ever been truly patriotically stirred by Alexander Nevsky; it’s more like a billboard than a movie. I guess the Soviets were pretty into billboards, too.

Yes, I know, the movie was terrifically popular in its time. I believe those audiences went to see images and hear sounds. There are several good ones here. I just don’t believe that they were feeling the patriotic feelings that are the whole point of the project. Or rather I don’t believe that this movie drew out those feelings. It might have given people a convenient excuse to indulge feelings that already existed. Not well-adjusted feelings of simple patriotism, mind you! Something more akin to Frank Sinatra’s immortal “I just wish someone would try to hurt you so I could kill them for you.” If you were already champing at the bit for some enemies, there are indeed pictures of some enemies in this movie. Good enough for government work!

Even from this limp film, one can tell that Sergei Eisenstein (file photo) had a genuine talent, but a formal one rather than a fluid one. His conception of cinema seems to have been something like a photo gallery, or a comic book: a series of framed images, each one attempting an iconic quality. That’s all well and good on paper, but on film and in motion, absent any sense of organic emotional momentum, it just plays like an exercise.

His knack for concocting iconography ought to have been just the thing for propaganda. How to show that the crusaders are evil? Show one tossing an infant into a fire! Done. This is certainly some species of genius. But in practice, even that shocking image slots into the thudding editorial rhythm as just another problem solved, another concept executed. It’s juice-less.

In fact it’s funny to me that “formalism” was what the Stalinist regime claimed to revile, since that’s the perfect word for what goes on in a piece of insincere craftsmanship like this. Formalism is the shell left over when the heart is denied; it’s what artists have to fall back on when they’re assigned to churn out propaganda. Only art produced in bad faith deserves to be called “formalist.”

I guess all criticism is projection.

Every work of art stems from some underlying worldview, and thus embodies it. So whenever the Soviets denounced a work as “formalist,” they were evading the work’s actual point of view by denying that it had one. This shows a remarkable lack of faith in their own ideology; otherwise they would have confronted competing ideologies head-on. (Deriding a work as “capitalist” is at least a genuine attempt to assess its outlook.)

From an audience perspective, “formalism” is really a measure of pacing: does the mind have time to kill, in which there is nothing better to do than be concerned with form? While watching Alexander Nevsky, I idly imagined re-editing the action down to its intrinsic dramatic rhythm, eliminating all the deadly moments of “art appreciation.” That movie would be much shorter.

Superficial comparison to Dreyer’s Joan of Arc occurs to me; both films are heavily stylized medievalism made with a photographer’s eye. They share certain textural qualities. But Joan of Arc moved me, seemed like an obvious success. The stylization and artifice there always seemed to surround and serve intensely human, emotional concerns. So maybe the real problem with Alexander Nevsky is simply that there’s no Falconetti here; there’s no living face to turn on my human sense, my sense of meaning. Nikolai Cherkasov as Alexander Nevsky looks to me like a middling substitute teacher, the kind who keeps coming back but whose name you never take the time to learn.

I understand that pageantry works on a different level than normal narrative, and that Alexander Nevsky is trying to be a pageant. When the spiritual component feels so incredibly thin, that can also mean that the true spiritual component lies very deep. All spectacle is spiritual at a pre-propagandistic level, a subconscious level.

But watched that way, as pure apolitical image-glorification, the movie gives the constant feeling that the things in front of the camera are failing to be as transcendently epic as the vision demands. When Nevsky shakes his locks free of his helmet in glorious low angle, victorious atop his steed, it looks completely silly and insufficient. Nice try. That’s okay, Sergei; we get what you were going for.

This movie needs to be about a hundred feet tall to work. That’s why Prokofiev’s cantata, the music separated from the film, is a far superior piece of art. Music is born a hundred feet tall.

Alexander Nevsky is so profoundly dusty and limited that it can actually be hard to remember that the people making it weren’t themselves dusty and limited, but modern men and women of 1938, with fully modern psychologies. Yes, even in the Soviet Union! I think that’s important to keep clearly in mind, if we’re to understand what the achievements and the failures are. In this case the unrelenting artificiality is both the achievement and the failure.

(I was planning to embed a Getty image here like I did last time, something like this, but I guess the license to embed doesn’t apply to all their images.)

I watched the movie on Filmstruck, which offers a much superior restoration and is all-around more authentic. The copy of the movie included on the DVD is a 1986 Soviet clean-up job that does not use the original soundtrack recording overseen by Prokofiev. That original recording is frequently cited as having shamefully poor audio quality, but to my ear it’s not so much worse than any number of other crackly 30s soundtracks. The DVD version replaces the music with a later re-recording (apparently conducted by one Emin Khachaturian, Aram’s nephew) that, once noticed, feels conspicuously anachronistic. (I think it also uses the expanded orchestration Prokofiev created later for the concert version.) Also the title cards are all reset in typefaces that would never have been used in 1938. I’m sensitive to such things.

However I still got the DVD out from the library because it has lots of bonus features that aren’t on Filmstruck. Setting aside the movie itself, the disc is a pretty good package. There’s a competent commentary by David Bordwell of the sort that I normally scoff at for being hopelessly academic in outlook, but in this case it seems like just the thing. What else is there to do with this movie other than rattle off observations about the shot compositions? That paradigm, the one I criticize as so stilted and fuddy-duddy and beside the point, is Eisenstein’s home turf. He laid the groundwork for that kind of talk and it fits his work like a glove sticking out of a helmet.

(Bordwell describing Eisenstein’s technique: “… never using one shot where two or three will do.”)

There’s also very well done 20-minute “video essay” by Russell Merritt on Sergei Prokofiev’s music, and his collaborative process with Eisenstein, with extended emphasis on Walt Disney as an influence. I found this far more rewarding viewing than the film itself. If it were on YouTube I’d link to it.

Merritt: “Eisenstein later wrote that working with Prokofiev’s music, and working with Prokofiev to develop new theories of film music, were for him the only enriching aspects of Nevsky.” That’s about how the movie feels.

Plus there’s a whole other movie on the disc, too. Sort of. Bezhin Meadow (which borrows its title but not its content from Turgenev’s story of the same name, which as you all surely remember was already addressed on an earlier episode of this program) was Eisenstein’s previous project (1935–37), but was canceled before release, suppressed, and ultimately destroyed. However, Eisenstein apparently had the habit of keeping a private copy of the first and last frames from each shot of his movies, and these survived. In 1965, a director and a film historian found them and put them together into a kind of 25-minute filmstrip version of the entire movie, with intertitles taken from the original script. That assemblage is all that remains of Bezhin Meadow, and so to give a little extra dimension to the boxset, Criterion has included it. It’s not a movie, and it can’t really be watched as a movie… but as a record of a lost movie it’s extremely generous. There’s so much here — you can see what every single shot looked like, clear as day! — that your instincts tell you surely the rest of the movie isn’t really lost. But it is.

Here are the two things I’ll say about Bezhin Meadow:

1) I can’t tell whether I would have enjoyed the movie — as with so many Soviet works about everyday heroes living on communes, the dramatic arc seems awfully suspect — but I can easily tell that this was a more interesting and soulful piece of work than Alexander Nevsky. The faces are better. The sense of humanity is stronger.

2) Since Eisenstein already treated film essentially as a moving slideshow, the filmstrip format actually flatters him. The fact that he had the inclination to keep a souvenir frame from every shot is, I think, pretty indicative of where his personal satisfactions lay; in that sense, it’s not aesthetically arbitrary that this is what happens to survive. It feels like he was at some level a baseball card collector and this is a complete set. His projects were conceived as sequential photography, and the photography is certainly quite good. He would have been a natural for those old Richard J. Anobile books. (Remember when I said I fantasized about editing Alexander Nevsky down to its natural internal rhythm? I think this might be actually it: a series of still images, a few seconds apiece, about 20 minutes total.)

Bezhin Meadow was going to have music by Gavriil Popov; in its absence, Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 6 (and Zdravitsa) has been slathered over the proceedings. Good music, but not very well matched to what’s going on; generally it only serves to confuse the drama, which is already fairly confusing.

Luckily I don’t feel obligated to try to puzzle it all out. As far as I’m concerned, this is just a bonus feature, and by watching it at all, I gave it its due.

Criterion includes some on-set photography and a bunch of related articles to page through onscreen, including Eisenstein’s groveling official mea culpa. Fine. Can’t say I read every word of it all but I sure did page through!

If you read books about film music, you’ll often come across this silly diagram that Eisenstein made of a sequence in Alexander Nevsky, showing how blips in the music supposedly correspond to blips in the image — the premise apparently being that the viewer is in some sense always “reading” the image from left to right, as though it were a written document. This is an obvious absurdity, and is indicative of Eisenstein’s eccentric, anti-intuitive way of relating to the medium. It certainly has nothing to do with the way most directors use music. But the diagram is so compelling qua diagram that people have a hard time resisting the urge to reprint it. It’s a classic.

Having finally seen the film, I realize that because Eisenstein’s technique is so utterly formalist, this stupid diagram actually makes a certain sense after all. Incidental music generally seems to apply itself to whatever is most emotionally salient about the drama in a given moment. Within the deadened formalist outlook, a pure visual arrangement of e.g. individual figures interrupting a flat landscape does indeed start to seem like it’s probably the most significant thing going, and the music accordingly starts to seem like it’s probably commenting on the shot composition… because what else is there?

I’m a big Prokofiev fan — he’s right up there on my shortlist of favorite composers — and I must say that Alexander Nevsky has always seemed to me rather overrated among his works. The majority of the score is in his Soviet monumentalist mode, glutinously expansive. Prokofiev injected himself with some kind of Stalinist novocaine to produce works for the state, of which there are many in his late-career output. They’re certainly not worthless, but it helps to be in a stupor. And yet Alexander Nevsky often gets packaged alongside things like Lieutenant Kijé and the Scythian Suite, which are to my ear much more immediately and consistently rewarding.

The reason it stands out in popularity above Prokofiev’s many other Soviet-era works is surely the long “Battle on the Ice” movement, which paved the way for all manner of Hollywood excitement. The first section, when the crusaders emerge from over the empty horizon and then charge all the way to the waiting Russians, is the clear standout and by far the high point of both the film and the score. In fact I think many people would say this is one of the high points for film music as a whole. The bumping two-note ostinato of the charge, which creates an ever-expanding anticipatory tension, is a perfect musical conception. John Williams stole it outright for Jaws, and who can blame him.

So that’s of course our selection (despite a couple of brief spoken interruptions). Apparently in Prokofiev’s original score this cue was called Свинья, “The Swine,” which refers to the wedge-shaped attack formation. You can hear this same material recorded in rich symphonic stereo in a hundred concert recordings. Here, for a change, enjoy the original crackly, noisy, sloppy, small orchestra recording from the film.

You know, it might just have been the worst possible timing for me personally with this movie. Right now I’m in a moment where I’d really prefer to be transported than be asked to contemplate something dispassionately, so this felt like a singularly unfortunate choice. Every now and then, while I was trying to get through it a second time with the commentary, I would notice the image out of the corner of my eye and suddenly think, “Hey, this is kind of cool to look at. I see how at a technical level this is an interesting piece of work. Maybe it isn’t actually as bad as all that.” It was just never able to sustain that impression under direct attention. And I accept that maybe that was simply a question of where my head happened to be.

But that’s what I’ve got to work with.

Let’s get this over with already! I just want to be watching other movies.

Oh right, oops, next is just more Eisenstein. I hear they’re gonna be better, though. Let’s see.

2001:

contains:
• Alexander Nevsky (1938)
• Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944) & Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1945, released 1958)

Criterion #86. Once again, this number corresponds to a cardboard box rather than a movie.

It contains two plastic cases, numbered 87 and 88; the former contains one DVD and the latter two. None of this material is sold separately. Thus 86 applies exclusively to the cardboard box.

I do not actually have access to this cardboard box. I cannot directly review this cardboard box. The best I can do is look at pictures of this cardboard box, reconstruct a virtual cardboard box in my mental laboratory, and then review that.

It seems like a pretty nice cardboard box. I imagine it as pretty sturdy.

Our musical selection is once again, as it must be, the Criterion logo jingle:

The next time this will happen is #124. Thank you.

2000: [OOP 9/2009]
(replaced by equivalent “Essential Art House” edition)

directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard
screenplay and dialogue by Bernard Shaw
scenario by W.P. Lipscomb and Cecil Lewis

Criterion #85.

Streamed from FilmStruck‘s Criterion Channel.

My mode at repertory musicals: trying my skill against theirs with the familiar material; asking “have they aced it?” rather than just watching. Like catty operagoers have done for centuries. I can’t help it. This is what comes of spending too much time with scripts and scores: everything starts to look like scheme and execution instead of pure phenomenon.

Even in that petty light this comes off very well, besting My Fair Lady at its own game.

Bursting into song actually suppresses dramatic pathos; it prematurely resolves all dissonances of sentiment. There is something truly poignant, not just structurally poignant, in this straight version. A full human being has too many feelings for any one song, and the question of what constitutes a full human being is at issue in this story. Pygmalion may be a sort of fable but it is not a fairy-tale.

A 20-second scene in Eliza’s home at the start pays dividends later that the musical misses: we understand that she has always been her own person; she is not Higgins’s creation. Galatea was a stone given soul; Eliza is already a soul, given a new stone setting, one among many possible. Her awakening is not her transformation itself; it is simply learning that she has the ability to transform.

The musical insinuates a Cinderella lust-for-glamour, a priori materialism, which ruins the play’s truly radical message: that all people are already equal and the trappings of class are arbitrary. Fancy dress does not actualize Eliza. Why would it? It is significant that she could not have danced all night; after all, whoever said she wanted to? Her uncertainty about what she wants is at the heart of the play and not to be plugged up for convenience.

The work montage here is far superior: Eliza has no clueless, tone-deaf phase; she’s immediately capable and industrious; the regimen of exercises seems coherent and believable; Higgins’s confidence seems to jibe with his abilities. We see her will and his; the only reason either of them has to sweat is the time pressure. There’s no vague, mysterious block to overcome first. That is to say: the Broadway contrivance of an impasse to precede a “eureka” markedly weakens the message that all that stands between Covent Garden and Buckingham Palace is weightless fuzz. The mysterious block, the sword that must be pulled from the stone, is none other than our projected prejudice: that an ordinary flower girl could obviously never pull this off, but a Chosen One could. (i.e. Audrey Hepburn.) This is not good faith.

Spry, younger-seeming Higgins is much preferable to the standard tweed. Personality comes into sharper psychological relief the less it’s telegraphed by physique and costume; we have to contend with the ways his outlook is available to us, too. Higgins’s attitude, its virtues and sins, becomes the focus of this script. This is the richest vein in the material and surely Shaw’s point of fascination.

His contempt is for the highs as well as the lows, and none of it is felt; in his abstracted way he loves all, he just doesn’t know it. He cavalierly tosses Eliza money that changes her life, because he enjoys the British forms and they include charity. But as he smirks, we hear uplifting church music all the same because the form delivers its substance no matter the spirit. Who’s to say this isn’t truest love?

It is only Henry’s lack of conventional empathy that allows him to genuinely help Eliza’s inner self. By his complete failure to feel her as an individual, he grants her uniquely unconstrained potential to be an individual. Being felt can be repressive. And yet we need it from one another; being a “consort battleship” is nobody’s heart’s desire. His problem is not that he cannot give but that he cannot receive. And everyone needs to be received, to be found. A moving portrait of the true nature of sympathy, and of empathy: each is the price of the other’s power.

Eliza’s Turing Test is the same for all of us; all of society is a Turing Test. If the difference can’t be told, there is no difference.

Consider the handling of Wendy Hiller’s physiognomy. Is it regal beauty or mask-like grotesque? Don’t worry: the movie will decide for you, scene for scene. When she emerges for tea dressed like Pinkie it’s parody, but her climactic presentation as the belle of the ball is quite serious. If the audience is drawn in — and we are — then we are part of the social conditions under critique. I felt a slap being administered to every “taking off her glasses to reveal her beauty” scene in cinema. Who says? The male gaze is just one of a thousand arbitrary frameworks. There’s also the Queen-of-Transylvanian gaze, etc. We can’t stop gazing but we can at least try to remember that everyone is protean.

Hiller is completely excellent. Shaw’s personal choice for the role and no wonder. She gives much more than one is accustomed to seeing given. In the ostensibly comic bathing scene she lets in genuine horror and indignity. This encapsulates the meaning of the whole story.

Apparently Getty allows you to embed images for free.

From the above it should be clear that as regards the ending my sympathies are 100% with Shaw, who disapproved vociferously. Henry thinks “tower of strength” is the highest possible approval; Eliza realizes that to the contrary she is in fact a person and says “goodbye.” That is rightly the culmination of the action and should suffice as its terminus. The sugary tag — invented for this movie and then carried over into posterity by Lerner and Loewe — is just commercial timidity.

In musing on the movie I came across many interesting side channels relating to Shaw, his work on the screenplay, the play’s past and future, etc. etc. etc. Originally I thought to discuss such things here. But the material was so plentiful exactly because it’s all such well-covered ground. Why strain to add to that when I’ve already said my piece?

First Criterion appearance of Koenig’s manometric flame apparatus. And probably last but one never knows.

The image is pretty bad. The transfer isn’t great and the film needs restoration. The streaming and DVD versions are the same.

The DVD offers no supplements. FilmStruck has a 3-minute TCM-style interview-cum-promo, “David Staller on Pygmalion (1938),” which is fine enough for one of those. I certainly admire the craft of the TCM montage team; they can make any old movie look superficially lively and promising. But that’s also the problem: their house style is homogenizing and ultimately condescending to the material. Especially their music. It all tends to feel a bit like in-elevator entertainment at a mid-range hotel. Still, simply as 3-minute propaganda pieces I can’t really fault them.

Now that streaming has entered the building as a viewing option, the supplement situation is likely to become quite complex and potentially sticky. Some of the original disc supplements are available at FilmStruck — but not all. Some supplements have been newly produced for FilmStruck and do not exist on disc. Some films are available to stream in new transfers not yet released on disc (see the title cards in the previous entry for an example). At present I can make no promises about what my policy will be — that is, what will count as having watched a given Criterion release and what won’t — but rest assured we at broomlet take such matters very, very seriously and we have top men looking into it right now.

Arthur Honegger of all people! The Criterion site database includes two other films with music by Honegger but neither of them is part of the main numbered series, so this is it.

I had no idea he had it in him. I knew he did pictorial music but not such genial commercial stuff as this. Though he does sneak in some quirky modern corners and angles. (The striking little oscilloscope cue early on.)

The idea of “My Fair Lady as composed by Arthur Honegger” is amusing to me. Some of the work has already been done:

Not to mention:

Official selection is the main title and introduction:

The tune in the strings starting at 0:45 functions as Eliza’s theme and gets several treatments over the course of the movie. Not that I noticed on first viewing.

The score overall is quite good. Never released or rerecorded. According to a Honegger biography I found, the manuscript is mostly lost. Then again the same biographer wrongly asserts that most of Honegger’s music was replaced in the film — which at first I thought must account for why it didn’t sound like Honegger, but which actually just seems to be a bit of confusion on the writer’s part. MGM made their own American cut of the movie that did indeed replace most of the music with stuff by house composer William Axt, and also re-edited a couple of scenes, but nobody ever watches that version these days, for obvious reasons. Seems like the biographer came across a copy of that and mistook it for the original.

Or else I’m being duped and the music you just heard is really by Louis Levy or someone. But I doubt it.

For my untenanted location still, I had to chase the editor all around; he didn’t seem to want to let me have one. Last time I was so stymied was Brief Encounter, and lo and behold, the editor of Pygmalion was David Lean. I guess he must have made it a real point of principle that there should be human activity in absolutely every frame.

Almost settled for a frame with a sliver of person in it but then finally found this one. Whew.